TEA is the name of a shrub belonging to the Camellia family with alternate and simple leaves, not dotted; the flowers are large and showy, with a persistent calyx of five overlapping sepals, and they have many stamens, their filaments united at the bottom with each other and with the base of the petals.

Formerly different kinds were supposed to exist, all of which were said to be indigenous to China, Japan and India, until Robert Fortune, known by his botanical journeys, proved the incorrectness of this opinion. He lived for a long while in the tea districts of China and India for the purpose of studying the manufacture of tea; he showed that all sorts of tea that are thrown upon the market descend from one kind that extremely varies; this variation is shown chiefly in regard to the length and width of the leaves; in the course of a thousand years' cultivation a great number of varieties had sprung forth from this one kind. The tea shrub grows in its wild state 6 to 10 metres high; while the cultivated shrub reaches a height of not more than 2 metres, or 6 feet.

The cultivation of tea, according to Chinese traditions of the fourth century, came from Corea to China, and from there to Japan in the ninth century.

About the sixth century the Chinese used to drink tea nearly all over their country. The Europeans have tried to plant and cultivate the tea-shrub in Bengal, Ceylon, on the western coast of Africa, in Java and Sumatra, in Brazil, and many other places. In all these districts the shrub grows, but is degenerated detrimentally, as its aroma never reaches that of the genuine Chinese tea.

The method of extracting the te'in by boiling water has been known in China as long as the cultivation of the shrub; the Europeans, however, learned it very late, first by the Dutch East India Company, about the middle of the seventeenth century, although the first importation of tea to Europe had taken place already in the year 1636. England got its first tea in the year 1666. The consumption of it increased continually, and was general in the eighteenth century. Although tea was believed for a long while a sure and reliable drug for lengthening life, the habit of tea-drinking is not so widely spread as that of coffee.

Tea - drinking has become a national habit only among the Dutch and the English, who imported the tea also to their colonies in North America, the United States, and Canada, to the Cape of Good Hope and to Australia, likewise to Portugal. Russia, Sweden, Norway, and the coast countries of middle Europe rank next. Who does not know of the great tea-riot in Boston that gave the signal for the outbreak of the Revolution, and shows the importance tea had obtained at that time in a colonist's household?